By Ken Goe, Oregonian, June 6, 2020
Odis Avritt had concerns, which is why he went to Linfield College football coach Paul Durham’s office late in the fall of 1965.
Linfield had rallied to beat Sul Ross State and advance to the NAIA championship game against St. John’s of Minnesota. Avritt was a Linfield running back.
The title game was in Augusta, Georgia, home of the famed Augusta National Golf Club and the Masters Tournament. It was deep in what then was the segregated South. Avritt is black.
“I never had been that far south in my life,” Avritt says. “I’d read and heard about teams going down there, and teammates being split up. I wanted to know what was going to happen.”
Durham heard him out before answering.
“Coach Durham said we’re going there as a team and we will be staying together,” Avritt remembers. “That was the end of it.”
The Wildcats went to Augusta and all stayed in a hotel hosting the teams and NAIA officials. They lost the game and went back to get ready for an NAIA banquet and hall of fame induction ceremony in the hotel that night.
After Linfield’s traveling party filed into the banquet room, some players noticed Durham talking to a hotel official and then making several trips into the kitchen.
“I wondered what in the world he was doing?” defensive lineman Bob Ferguson says. “What’s coach doing in the kitchen?”
When the food came out, it was served to everyone but the Linfield players, coaches and boosters.
Linfield had a 33-player traveling squad that included several black and Hawaiian players. Everybody was hungry, and a little taken aback.
Ferguson, Avritt and other Linfield players pieced it together later from those who overheard some uncomfortable conversations between Durham and the hotel staff.
“As Coach Durham was escorting our team into the banquet hotel, he was approached by the manager of the banquet area,” Avritt says. “He said, ‘Your black and brown players will have to eat in the kitchen.’
“I can’t really say how that conversation transpired, other than Coach Durham’s response was: ‘Well, if those players have to eat in the kitchen, our whole team will eat in the kitchen.’ Coach was informed: No, they couldn’t serve the whole team in the kitchen. So, Coach Durham said, ‘Well, if you’re not going to serve our whole team in the banquet area, then don’t serve us.’”
The hungry players didn’t hear it from Durham. He simply gathered them together after the banquet, pulled out his wallet, handed each one $5 and told them to find something to eat.
People on the hotel staff told Linfield’s black and Hawaiian players of a restaurant that would allow them inside. Avritt went with mixed feelings.
“I felt bad,” says Avritt, who is retired and lives in Portland. “I guess I knew somewhere along the line something wasn’t going to work out. I had that feeling.
“But I think Coach Durham lived up to his word to me. We were there as a team. That was reflected in his actions.”
Ferguson, who is white, concedes he didn’t think much about it at the time. In his mind, that was the South. That was how things were there then.
Over time, he says he has come to a greater understanding about how dehumanizing the experience had been for some of his teammates. He has come to believe Durham not only was backing his non-white players, he was teaching something to the entire team by standing on principle and living up to his word.
“It was later in life, we realized how much guts that took for him to do something like that,” Ferguson says. “But it was so in his character.”
Durham coached football at Linfield from 1948 to 1967 and started a streak of consecutive winning seasons that now stands at 64 years. He left for the University of Hawaii to be athletic director. He died in 2007.
As the years passed, a number of his players wanted to ensure he didn’t fade into history. They organized and raised money to have a monument of Durham put up on the Linfield campus. Details of his 1965 stand against racism are inscribed on the monument.
“He was a great individual,” Avritt says. “He was early on in the Northwest Conference in bringing people of color to play on his team. He was always very forthright. He was a Christian. He lived to his morals.”
Avritt played for Linfield again in 1966 and remains an active supporter of the school and the athletic program.
“But I’ve never been back to Augusta,” Avritt says. “And I’m a golfer.”
On Sunday, June 7, 2020, 07:45:18 PM PDT, George Murdock:
I
haven't missed too many meals in my life, but 55 years ago I missed a dinner in
Augusta, Georgia. It was very likely one of the most remarkable experiences in
my life and one I have come to appreciate every year since. And every time the
memory of that amazing experience comes back, it is accompanied by one more
measure of respect for Paul Durham -- if additional respect is even possible.
As part of the Linfield Family, as Paul Durham envisioned it, we were taught
valuable lessons of respect for every human being over half a century
ago.
On Sun,
Jun 7, 7:56 PM, Bob Daggett:
Coach
Durham got it right then and all of us are honored to have known a great coach
and a greater man. PS When the 1966
Wildcat baseball team was in Kansas City for the NAIA National championship.
Our TEAM refused to go in to a KC restaurant because they would not serve one
of our TEAMMATES because of his ethnicity. We did win that National
Championship. We learned to respect all people at Linfield thanks to great
coaches, teachers and team leaders…”
Source:
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